The icon-only task manager stays empty when KDE is started until the first window is opened or the widget is resized. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Add the icon-only task manager widget to the desktop 2. Add a few launchers to it, size it and place it appropriately 3. Restart KDE 4. Once started, the widget is empty 5. Open a random window (e.g. start dolphin, ...) 6. The launches appear in the widget I tried this with a fresh user as well (so no "old" config data) and the behavior is absolutely the same. This problem also exists with KDE 4.9.5 at least. What's interesting though is that somehow this correlates with if a debug or release build is used of Qt and some kdelibs. With the debug build, everything is fine whereas with the release build, this happens. I haven't tested this with 4.9.97 yet, though.
Plasma 5.7 ships a fully-rewritten Task Manager backend which should resolve these issues. Please re-test with the Plasma 5.7 final release and feel free to reopen if problems do persist after all.